Relationships, listening, conflict (and an actor) in science & communication

For the past five or so years, I've been writing and speaking extensively about the value of relational work, including deep listening, in science and communication. It's so heartening to see others joining that chorus. Alan Alda (yes, that Alan Alda), who is now a visiting professor at a science communication center named after him at Stony Brook University, has a beautiful reflection on his work teaching scientists to communicate more effectively. In an interview in The Atlantic with Jessica Lahey, he says:

A new writing adventure

Today I've got a new article up with the excellent folks at Hippo Reads, who are working to bring academic voices to bear on important, timely topics. My first piece with them is "5 Key Facts about the California Drought—and 5 Ways We’re Responding to It." Of course, today it's pouring buckets here in northern California (those of us working on water here have decided the best way to get it to rain is to have a drought meeting, guess it works with writing too!).

The article is intended to be quick primer on the drought, a bit of a one-stop guide to some of the issues that have made it such a big deal this year. I talk about everything from California's reliance on snowpack to groundwater depletion to climate change - all informed by the latest research. I also discuss some our recent groundwater legislation, the water bond, and urban water conservation innovation. It's (hopefully) a nice overview of the range of issues at play.

The water haves and have nots

I have to admit that after almost a year of live tweeting California's drought -- and what seems likely to be at least another year of the same -- there are stretches of time where I can't help but feel totally numb to the amount of apocalyptic information that I have to sort through on a daily basis. But, today, there are a few things that have gotten my attention.

First, yesterday 60 Minutes did a really great segment on drought and groundwater depletion in California and around the world. If you care at all about water, food, farming, or national/global security, spending 13 minutes to get a compelling, curiosity-driven overview of the impact of aquifer drawdown on our lives and communities is totally worth it. Near the end of the segment, researcher Jay Famiglietti responds to a Lesley Stahl statement that "this is alarming" by saying "well, it should be alarming." And, though I'm not big on alarmism, in this case I will say: yes, yes it should.

From water to agriculture, more evidence that human relationships matter

The interest in and recognition of the value of relational work when it comes to science and conservation, and really across all sectors, seems to be reaching a critical point. Just this week, several pieces on everything from farming to water scarcity to forest management directly addressed the generative power of relationships between people in environmental work. I am thrilled, to say the least.

Questions of survival

Flying over an almost bare Mt. Shasta, with several 

wildfires burning up and down the western coast, in August. 

Photo by me.

Okay, so this drought in California has been going on for a while now, and many of us are starting to anticipate the beginning of our rainy season, which is normally somewhere around November through the end of March, with equal parts hope and dread, and that anxiety seems to be coming out in strange ways. Earlier this week, I woke up to this headline: "In virtual mega-drought, California avoids defeat." All of my days are filled with this kind of thing, like "It takes HOW much water to grow an avocado?!" or greek yogurt or other food of your choice, but I still felt a little cognitively challenged in even understanding the idea of a "virtual mega-drought" or what it might mean for California to "avoid defeat."

Relatedness in action in science practice (#3)

In a beautiful blog post, Megan Adams gives a personal and honest account of both the benefits and challenges of community-engaged ecological research. In "Doing Science that Matters: Engaging with Communities in Collaborative Scientific Research," she describes working in coastal British Columbia and collaborating with groups of indigenous and non-indigenous people with "long-standing, adaptive, and evolving knowledge of natural systems" on a variety of projects.

California drought and climate change: a science communication challenge

This week, a new report focused on extreme weather events and climate change came out in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Since so much of my job involves filtering and sorting through this kind of information, particularly as it relates to California water issues, which right now are all drought all the time, I spent Monday watching a series of articles and tweets attempting to summarize that report come out. First was a link to the report itself. There was a lot of traffic (I'm assuming), so the report wouldn't load for me. At the same time, I started to see a lot of tweets about how we basically now know that the California drought is caused by climate change. Then as the afternoon went on came a series of tweets about how there is absolutely no measurable way that climate change caused the drought. Literally, two totally different headlines on the same topic within hours of each other. It was hard, even as somebody who is pretty well immersed in this stuff, to interpret the findings and figure out why the stories were so totally different.

Reconciling science research and practice

There is a lot of conversation these days around "bridging" research and practice in various fields - as a science and conservation type I tend to pay more attention to that piece, but I also see it in active conversation in the humanities and other fields as well. There are two main threads here that I think are helpful to break apart - one is how to better connect the results of research (and, not often enough, the process of research) with practice. The other related, but somewhat separate, piece is how to better train graduate students for practice-based careers in the sciences.

Boundary spanning

I am in the middle of preparing a talk for next week's 99th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), which will be in Sacramento, CA this year, an easy train ride for me. This is my first slide for my talk, which is (sadly but predictably) still taking shape.

Almost 20 years ago, I spent a couple of years working for ESA, first as a public affairs intern and then as staff with a program within the Society that was called the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative, launched after a paper from Jane Lubchenco and others proposed the concept in what was at the time a controversial paper published in Ecology. While in graduate school at Berkeley, I continued to be involved with ESA, starting the student section in 2000 - it is really exciting to see how that section has truly taken off. I am now ending my final year of service on the ESA Public Affairs Committee and will be going out on a good note with a short talk on California's drought that I will be giving to introduce rancher Dan Macon at a lunch for ESA's Rapid Response Teams. I am particularly honored to open for Dan, whose blog post on the emotional toll of drought inspired my own on live-tweeting the drought.

From parched to water-logged and back again

This tree in Killarney National Park was the
most alive thing I've been near  in a long time.
Worth the trip!

For much of this year my life has been all about the drought in California, whether live tweeting it at work, or trying to understand my own experience living with it. Somewhere in the middle of the worst of it, when it seemed it might never rain again, I wrote about trying to stay sane, at the last minute adding a line about needing a vacation, which upon further reflection seemed like a message from my subconscious. Being the type to take those kinds of messages seriously, in April I quickly decided to take a trip, and ended up in one of the wettest places I've been in a good long while: Ireland. Which was *spectacularly* wet, and very green, following several months of heavy rains and floods that were basically at the opposite end of the weather spectrum from what we were experiencing in California.